After a Green/Social Democrat coalition won control of the Hamburg state parliament in a February 2020 election, the new government, under Mayor Peter Tschentscher, moved quickly to launch an ambitious transportation strategy for a fast-growing urban region of five million people. “We need to change the way mobility is organized in our city,” says Dennis Heinert, a government spokesperson. (The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has long enjoyed state status in Germany.)
The coalition’s goal is striking: 80 per cent of trips within the city will be via transit, walking, cycling or other shared modes by 2030 in order to cut private vehicle use and carbon emissions. The plan calls for better transit service without fare hikes, a major expansion of the cycling network, and a strategy to load up transit hubs (known as “switch points”) with a range of mobility options, such as e-bike rentals, that cover the last mile between transit stations and home or work.
A central feature of the strategy is the concept of an intelligent transportation system (ITS), which uses various smart city technologies to knit all the pieces together. The elements include self-piloted subway trains and autonomous minibuses, and, eventually, a mobility-as-a-service system that allows travellers to book bike or scooter rentals, carpooling trips or ride-shares from a single app.
How will city officials evaluate the components of the system? “Very easy,” replies Heinert. “Will it help our political goal of the transition of mobility?” State officials, he continues, will vet the portfolio of mobility technologies in terms of how they promote safer, greener and more efficient movement within the region. “There is no project within this whole ITS which is not working towards those goals.”
The oversight of Hamburg’s mobility-technology game plan isn’t difficult to discern: an election brought in a sustainability-minded coalition that wants to advance a program that includes a range of technologies, as well a bureaucratic framework for evaluating those systems. The governance, in other words, is highly transparent, and voters will be able to judge the coalition’s success.
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“Governance” is a somewhat nebulous term that orbits around the politics of smart city technology, frequently cited but rarely defined with any degree of precision. At the most abstract level, governance is about accountability. How can ordinary people — and the public institutions that act on their behalf — be assured that these emergent technologies deployed in and around cities will do more good than harm? With the dramatic acceleration of pandemic-related service digitization, as well as the continued rapid growth of so-called platform companies like Lime, Airbnb and Uber, that question has taken on even more saliency.